Antichrist

Mkay. Antichrist. Made in 2009…which is a lot…recenter? Than I had expected. The only two actors in the movie, if you exclude the baby that’s in it for five minutes and the groups of women with their faces blurred out that are in it for five minutes, are Willem Dafoe, who plays the “him” and another actress…I’d never heard of her, so, like usual, I don’t remember her name…in case you didn’t guess, she plays the “her”.
The basic idea is that this couple’s baby falls out of a window and dies while they are having sex. Afterward, the female is not dealing with it well at all. Being a psychiatrist, the husband takes his wife case on himself, and decides to take her somewhere that she is afraid of. It’s a forest called Eden, where they have a cabin and where his wife had spent a great deal of time with her son, working on a book she was writing about gynocide. Things just go south from there, as the husband figures things out about his wife, and she gets out of control.
One thing that I really liked about this movie was that it was divided into six…a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue. I didn’t like the whole chapter thing at first…but it really came to make sense in the end.
The prologue and epilogue are in black and white…and the prologue is when the couple are having sex and the baby dies. The first chapter is called Grief. The part of the story where they are still at home dealing with their baby’s death is included in this chapter. At the very end, they decide to leave for the forest. The chapter ends with a deer with a stillborn baby hanging out of the womb…
Chapter two is called Pain. It’s basically her treatment at the cabin, getting better and worse…this chapter ends with him seeing a fox like, eating itself.
Chapter three is where it really picked up for me. Dafoe catches on that something is weird. And it turns out, that by going through her books and notes, he realizes that while she was up here trying to write against gynocide, she actually ended up believing that it was true and just and necessary. So, shit happens and he ends up having his genitals smashed by a piece of wood, gets knocked out (obviously…like, shit) and drills a hole in his leg and screws a weight to him so he can’t escape. There is a lot more graphic torture and shit going on in this chapter…but I’m going to skip to the end where Dafoe is trying to smash a crow in the head and kill it with a stone.
The last chapter is called the three beggars. Which kinda pulls everything together. Part of the woman’s study notes included information on the three beggars. Which are the Deer (Grief) the Fox (Pain) and the Crow (Despair). I really liked how they worked that. The woman told Dafoe that the three beggars were coming, and when they did, someone needed to die. I thought it was pretty obvious at this point that she was going to be the one to die. Despite what she did to him…
The prologue consists of Dafoe, limping through the forest, and suddenly, hundreds of women with their faces blurred out come up to greet him.
So, I thought that this movie was actually really really disturbing. I mean, I’ve seen a lot. A lot that have claimed to be ‘most disturbing of the year’ or ‘of all time’. But this one, I would actually consider to live up to that statement.
I thought it was clever how she prevented both her son and her husband from leaving her. Earlier in the movie she says something about her son trying to leave…wander about…when they were in the cabin in the summer, and from photos, Dafoe sees that she began butting his boots on the wrong feet…perhaps to cripple him, or prevent him from leaving? Later in the movie she does something similar to Dafoe, drilling a hole in his leg and attaching a weight to him.
She seems all emotion, all self centered, and not at all intelligent…where as I feel like they made him, for the most part, generally emotionless, concerned more for others than himself, and extremely intelligent. It was interesting…and verging on annoying, the entire time, he kept his doctorly composure.
This is one of the only movies that I have seen in my life that I have felt like I needed to turn away from. Actually, I think I did…when the girl cuts her clit off…man…I could not fucking watch that haha…other than that, I watched the entire thing, but I don’t think I have felt the urge to look away from the screen that much in a looooong time, if ever.

8.1/10